IN what is an incredibly painstaking process, experts at Bradford Museums and Galleries are slowly undertaking the mammoth task of ensuring more and more of the district's photographic archive is readily available online.

So far under one per cent of the almost half a million prints and negatives that are housed at Bradford Industrial Museum in Eccleshill have been digitised by the team.

But fresh images are being uploaded regularly and are fast becoming a popular section of the museum's website as people log on to view the latest offering.

John Ashton, the photographic archive assistant for the museums service, said: "At the moment it's a very slow process, which we are hoping to modernise in the next year or so.

"We use a flatbed scanner connected to a Mac and either the print or the negative is scanned. We scan to quite a high resolution so that if we ever want to blow up a picture to a very large size, we know we have the resolution to do that.

"We are hoping to use a photographic system with a mounted camera and move away from scanning the images, but this involves buying new equipment."

The archive itself contains both glass and film negatives from several collections.

The largest of these is that of Bradford commercial photographer CH Wood. Other important collections include the images of Christopher Pratt, taken during the early 20th century, and those of Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, the museum's photographers whose work shows how Bradfordians lived in the 1980s, as well as images from Manningham's Belle Vue Studio of individual, group or family portraits.

As well as allowing the images, which have been stored in row upon row of boxes at the museum, to be uploaded to the website, the digitisation programme allows the images to be printed and used in exhibitions across the district's museums.

Mr Ashton, who devotes three days a week to the archive, has blogged: "As you might realise, processing such a huge number of images to they can uploaded to this site and seen by more people is taking some time.

"It's even quite a task selecting which images we're going to digitise; the choice is vast. Most of the time selection arises from an enquiry by a member of the public. On other occasions images are processed and printed to support an exhibition at one of our museums.

"However the choice is made, newly digitised images are uploaded to our website and highlighted in the 'Recently Digitised' section. The best of these 'new' photographs are also printed and displayed in the foyer at Bradford Industrial Museum."

The photographic archive service receives up to a dozen requests a month to buy copies of one of the 3,000 photos which are so far on its website.

Looking online at the photo collections available there are an array of different types of shots, including aerial photographs of the district, as well as images of commerce and industry, people and places, sport and leisure and transport.

The majority of the digitised images are from the CH Wood collection, but there are also examples of work by the Belle Vue Studio, Christopher Pratt and Bradford Museums' collections too.

An ongoing partnership with Bradford UNESCO City of Film sees a selection of historic images being shown on the big screen in City Park.

From Wednesday, and running until March 23, the North in Focus exhibition displays some of the latest additions at 12.15 everyday on the screen. The two and half minute-long slide show is intended to bring the historic images to a new audience.

The latest set of images are part of the CH Wood collection showing a variety of scenes from the late 1940s and early 1950s. They include a 1951 plaque at Esholt Hall, central garage in Bradford from 1948, various shots of Kirkgate Market in 1950, Norwood Green Mill in 1949, the showroom at Douglas Inman & Co at Sunbridge Road in 1951, a control panel at James Tate & Co, Victory Works, East Parade in 1951, a window display in Keighley from 1951, Busby's department store in 1951, and a shoe shop in Ivegate from 1950.

Mr Ashton said: "We must have overall almost half a million glass and film negatives and many prints as well from a variety of collections. It's gradually becoming more accessible as more and more of the images are digitised.

"We like to digitise them to a very high resolution and at the moment it's quite a slow process. We've probably not even got one per cent of the images online yet. But we are progressing and looking at ways that we can modernise and accelerate the speed of the digitisations."

The digitised photographic archive can be viewed online at photos.bradfordmuseums.org.